My Dress Hangs There

Frida Kahlo painted this in New York in 1933, while her husband Diego Rivera worked on his doomed mural at Rockefeller Center, the one the Rockefellers destroyed because he had put Lenin in it. She was homesick and unimpressed by America in the depths of the Depression. So she built a bitter little collage of Manhattan: skyscrapers, a church, an overflowing trash can, a toilet and a sports trophy raised on twin columns, a Statue of Liberty lost in the smoke. In the middle, on a blue hanger, hangs her own Tehuana dress from Mexico, empty. She left herself out entirely, as if her body might be in New York but her life was hanging elsewhere. She began the picture there and finished it back home in Mexico City.